


Untitled Tumblr Ficlet

by CloudCover (RainyForecast)



Series: Clear Blue Morning [3]
Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, If You Squint - Freeform, Minor Injuries, OHL, Pre-Relationship, Timestamp, major juniors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2019-03-18 22:42:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13691358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainyForecast/pseuds/CloudCover
Summary: Remember the little peewee goalie from Alina's Little Penguins game?This is a timestamp for Clear Blue Morning, and won't make much sense without reading that first.





	Untitled Tumblr Ficlet

Marcus Nguyen nearly drops his blocker when he sees her.

She hasn’t changed much, he thinks, catching glimpses of her smile behind her face shield, the dark brown wisps of hair coming loose from under her helmet.

Then, she takes her helmet off, shaking her hair completely loose and tilting her head back to drink from her water bottle.

His mouth goes dry and this time his blocker really does fall from his hand to bounce on the ice. He was wrong. She has changed. They aren’t kids in peewee anymore.

She probably doesn’t remember him, anyway. He’d never forgotten her, had thought endlessly about her smile and her bright eyes and the way she’d hug him hard enough to practically lift him off his skates after a game. He’d thought about her before he even knew what it meant to think about someone like that.

The warmup music is loud, and he’s supposed to be doing his thing, scraping up the ice in the crease. He’s not Sarnia’s starting goalie, he’s supposed to be looking sharp this game, trying to impress his coach and convince him to give Marcus more starts. He can’t let even Alina Malkin distract him from that. Not with her and the Erie Otters being as on-fire as they are right now.

The game is okay, great, even. The score is still thankfully tied at 1-1 at the start of the third, despite Malkin’s fucking  _gorgeous_  backhand. Coach has even given him a stern nod during intermission, which was another man’s grin and hearty backslap of encouragement.

However, everything goes to shit the last few minutes of the third. One of the Erie forwards has been all up in Marcus’s space the entire fucking night, and during a scrum someone on Marcus’s own team barrels into the guy and send him flying into Marcus. Marcus ends up at the bottom of a pile of thrashing bodies, his helmet lost who knows where.

There’s a sudden burst of pain on the side of his head. He’s got his hands up trying to protect it but he must have caught a glancing blow from a skate. He feels warm wetness under his fingers.

The whistle must have been blown, because suddenly the bodies are up and off of him and the ref is shouting something, and then one of the trainers is asking him if he can move.

When he opens his eyes, the ice is crimson under him and the arena is way too quiet. It hurts, but it isn’t excruciating though, so he gets a skate underneath himself and hauls himself to his feet with the aid of the trainer. The eyes of the players around him are big with shock, and he woozily wonders if his whole damn ear got sliced off or something. There’s Alina, looking concerned and so, so pretty. And tall. And pretty. And tall. He’s…lost a little bit of blood, he thinks.

He tries to smile at her but the trainer takes him by the elbow and guides him off the ice, to scattered applause from the taken-aback crowd.

It’s not too bad, actually, he finds out, when the team doctor checks him out. Scalp wounds bleed like motherfuckers, though, and they’re gonna put him through concussion protocol just to be safe. He’s out of the game, that’s for sure.

Later, he sits in the hall outside the visitor’s locker room, slumped over next to his gear bag and waiting for his team to finish getting changed, feeling maybe a little sorry for himself. He’s counting the floor tiles for the second time and wishing there was an outlet to charge his dead phone when he hears footsteps, and looks up to see a furtive looking Alina fucking Malkin dart into the hall, as stealthily as a girl nearly six feet tall can be in a completely empty hallway.

He stares at her as she approaches. She reminds him of those hot warrior ladies from the Wonder Woman movie. He wonders what the fuck she’s doing here.

“Hey,” she says softly, and slides down to sit on the floor next to him. “I came to see if you were okay.” Her accent is softer now, but it still colors her words with a warmth that makes his cheeks flush. Maybe this is the bloodloss again, and he’s hallucinating.

“Just a scalp wound,” he says. “They’re gonna watch me for a concussion but it’s mostly just to be safe.”

“Oh good, “ she says with a sigh of relief. Then she digs around in the pocket of her Otters hoodie and pulls out a slightly crumpled pack of Reese’s peanut butter cups. “Here. Get your blood sugar back up.” She smiles crookedly at him and he feels like his heart is going to beat out of his chest.

“Thanks,” he manages to rasp, and takes the candy. The soft look in her eyes is still making him think of  Wonder Woman, but this time of the scene where Diana is being really nice to the guy who got scared. Incredible. She’s still as amazingly nice as when she was seven.

“Little Penguins gotta look out for each other, right?” she says, still fucking  _smiling_  at him. Him!

“You— you remember that?” he croaks, and she laughs.

“Of course!” Are her cheeks a little…pink? From like, her post-game shower or something, probably.

“Wow,” he says, like a doofus, and she laughs again, looking even pinker.

“What’s your phone number?” she asks, kind of…looking at him from under her lashes, eyes big and velvety and dark. “Us Little Penguins gotta stick together.”

Somehow, he manages to scrape together enough brain cells to recite his number, and she promises to text him soon so that when he charges his phone again he’ll have her number as well.

She gives him a hand up. When they’re standing next to each other like that, he has to tilt his head up a little to look her in the eyes. He feels kinda sick. Girls like her don’t usually go for guys like him. But she’s still looking at him with pink cheeks and shining eyes, and before she leaves, so fast he’s not sure if really happens, she leans forward and presses a kiss to the butterfly bandages holding his cut together.

“To make it better,” she says, and then she’s gone, leaving him staring after her like he’s a seven year old peewee player again, rocked off his skates after a handshake line hug.

 _Hey! How’s the head?_  she texts him later, when he’s on the bus. He grins like a lunatic at his phone

He takes a deep breath. This is like a Stanley Cup final game seven. No time to choke now.

 _This really fucking badass girl gave me a Reeses and it helped a lot,_  he types, and then promptly feels like he wants to die. Could he  _be_  anymore of a loser?

His phone bleeps with another text, and he’s afraid to look. She’s sent him a sunglasses emoji, and it startles a laugh out of him.

 _You got a long drive, huh?_  she says next.   _What’s the most annoying thing a teammate has done on a roadie?_

He keeps grinning at his phone, and starts to tell her about the stupid prank AJ pulled last month, as his teammates doze around him in the darkened bus.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me as creaturesofnarrative (main) and knifeshoeoreofight (hockey blog) on Tumblr, and as @RainyForecast on Twitter. Come say hi!


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